Comment by 2Gkashmiri
4 years ago
why are we "expected" to honor their copyright for eternity when they do not honor their commitments ala "evolving licensing agreements".
what if i honored your copyright as long as it "suited me", then one day it didnt.
Due to my evolving licensing disagreement, I use torrents for all my movies and TV show watching needs.
> what if i honored your copyright as long as it "suited me", then one day it didnt.
That is already how consumers behave. You're living the dream right now!
Legal repurcussions differ. IMO it comes down to: what’s the likelihood someone pursues me, and will I survive the expected cost of my defense. Nobody likes love letters anyway.
Individuals may have a lower risk, but the cost is high if someone decides to come after you. Large corporations can take the legal costs far more easily.
There's ways to reduce your risk in this sort of thing. The reason why people come after individuals is because BitTorrent is an insanely risky system. The achilles heel of P2P is that it has no privacy whatsoever, so whoever wants to extort[0] individual pirates can do so.
However, direct-download sites generally do not confer risk onto their users in the same way. Even if the site gets taken down or sued, copyright owners generally don't care about following their logs to find individual downloaders. While they still probably can be sued[1], there's no reason for a legitimate party to do so. At that point the copyright holder got what they wanted, and marching down to everyone in the server logs' house to make sure they delete their infringing movies is absolutely stupid.
For the same reason I've never liked the idea of "P2P YouTube alternatives". People rightfully complain about how they mishandle anything related to copyright, and they do, but the alternative is having every copyright holder with a chip on their shoulder financially cripple anyone who watched a video they didn't like.
[0] Legal scholars will probably object to my use of the word "extort". Yes, if you have a legal claim for relief then threatening to sue for it is not extortion, it's just the law. However, the only way to actually make antipiracy enforcement at an individual level not financially crippling is to cross the line into actual extortion. The Prenda Law and Strike 3 Holdings incidents are good examples of how easy it is to do so.
[1] The law is actually somewhat ambiguous on where the infringement actually is when you download something. I used to think "uploading equals infringement", but there's been some court opinions arguing that either both uploading and downloading are infringements, or that they infringe different parts of copyright. Nobody's bothered to prosecute a direct-download pirate to the point where this matters.
Of course there's also Japan which has a law that explicitly makes mere downloading infringing. There be dragons.
1 reply →
Because we have little money for lawyers, while they have much money for lawyers
You're confusing the creator with the distributor platform
You don't get to steal from a musician because Sony cheated you
.
> why are we "expected" to honor their copyright
Because you don't want to be a thief
.
> they do not honor their commitments
They do, in fact.
It seems like you just assumed they committed to something they didn't, and are angry now that you've finally read the actual commitment.
.
> what if i honored your copyright as long as it "suited me", then one day it didnt.
Then you'd be a thief who pointed fingers at other people to justify your own choices
>You don't get to steal from a musician because Sony cheated you
elsevier copyrights papers on their own name. should we fuck with them ?
>It seems like you just assumed they committed to something they didn't, and are angry now that you've finally read the actual commitment.
sony committed to keep those movies but now they are backtracking on that commitment. why?
> elsevier copyrights papers on their own name. should we fuck with them ?
Unironically yes. Fuck Elsevier and what they've done to academic publishing.
Right, or they could offer refunds and it wouldn't be so bad.
This days after Nintendo letting us know they 'are unable (read- unwilling) to offer refunds.
We need consumer protection laws that do something, because since the 1990s businesses have made anti-consumer practices their bread and butter.
They don't fear us, the laws, or government in general. Businesses fucking lie cheat and steal every single day.